Texas’ Love for Violent Video Games: What Fuels the State’s Passion?

Video games have been an obsession since William Higinbotham created Tennis for Two in 1958.

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A big obsession for video games started when students were giving computer privileges in school and put a floppy disk into a computer and played the Oregon Trail trying to survive and not die from dysentery.

Remember Pong? Trying to keep the ball alive after breaking down a wall.  Then there was Frogger, where you had to avoid getting your frog squished while crossing a busy street. And who can forget the satisfaction of fitting Tetris pieces together to make lines disappear? As technology has advanced, video games have become more sophisticated, allowing you to feel like you're watching an animated movie while defeating your enemies.

As video games have evolved so has the violence in those games, and Texans are obsessed.

According to a new study done by Cloudwards, Texas is one of the states obsessed with violent video games.  They studied by analyzing Google search volumes of the 90 most violent video games.

Texas ranked #6 in the U.S.

The study found that 5,943 searches out of 100,000 people were conducted for violent video games.  That might not seem like a lot, but 100,000 people can search for some pretty random things.

Violent video game searches account for almost 6% of those searches.

If you look at most of the popular video games today, most of those games are violent. Even most of the games considered safe for kids have some form of violence, although very mild.

Almost 52% of gamers believe that violent video games develop teamwork and communication.

According to the Coolest Gadgets, 97% of young people play games, and 85% of those prefer playing violent video games.  More than 50% of all video games rated by the ESRB contain violence, and 90% of those games are approved for children under 10.

The Cloudwards study found that California was the top state for violent video game obsession with 52,081, followed by New York with 27,211 searches. North Dakota was the least with 25 searches.

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